Samsung may manufacture Qualcomm's 10nm Snapdragon 830

Samsung LSI currently manufactures Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 on its second-gen 14nm LPP FinFET node, and it looks like the South Korean company has bagged a contract for next year's 10nm Snapdragon 830 as well. That's according to Korea's ET News, which states that the SoC will be used in the Galaxy S8. Samsung will likely retain the same strategy it followed for the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, wherein U.S. models are powered by the Snapdragon 830, while the global version runs its upcoming Exynos 8895.

Like the Snapdragon 830, Samsung's in-house Exynos 8895 will also be based on the 10nm manufacturing process. ET News also writes that Qualcomm and Samsung are working in developing a FoPLP (Fan-out Panel Level Package) technology that eliminates the need for a printed circuit board for the package substrate that will be used in the Snapdragon 830 and Exynos 8895.

We don't know much about either SoC, but it looks like Samsung is looking to hit vastly higher frequencies by moving to 10nm. An Exynos 8895 leak from August suggests Samsung is hitting 4GHz on its custom Mongoose core, and reaching 2.7GHz on the Cortex A53 core. It'll be interesting to see the kind of performance gains Qualcomm achieves with its Kryo CPU implementation.